We are extremely happy to report that three members of Solid Angle's R&D team have been recognized with a Scientific and Engineering Award (Academy plaque) by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for their work on the Arnold renderer. We share this award with our friends in the Arnold dev team at Sony Pictures Imageworks with whom we have collaborated for years. Read more details at oscars.org and Variety.
From the official announcement:
To Marcos Fajardo for the creative vision and original implementation of the Arnold Renderer, and to Chris Kulla, Alan King, Thiago Ize and Clifford Stein for their highly optimized geometry engine and novel ray-tracing algorithms which unify the rendering of curves, surfaces, volumetrics and subsurface scattering as developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks and Solid Angle SL.
Arnold’s scalable and memory-efficient single-pass architecture for path tracing, its authors’ publication of the underlying techniques, and its broad industry acceptance were instrumental in leading a widespread adoption of fully ray-traced rendering for motion pictures.
